*What I’m watching on Saturday: Florida-Idaho and Northwestern-Cal are locked in as personal rooting interests, but keep your eye on Michigan’s rematch with App State to start the day, the late-afternoon Auburn-Arkansas grudge match (in which Auburn might score 70) and, in primetime, how defending-champ Florida State looks against a solid Oklahoma State.

*Last thought about expectations: Typically, I would say that it’s healthiest to have modest expectations about almost everything (including this email!), but it’s entirely OK to have a small, benign corner where you allow yourself to have irrationally high expectations (and the capacity to deal with the almost-inevitable disappointment). Talking to you, Alabama and Oregon fans.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

I published issue No. 2 of my new newsletter today -- never miss it by signing up at TinyLetter (it takes 10 seconds, max). It's coming along. I'm finding my footing. It's a work-in-progress, and probably will be for a few weeks, at least. I'd always like to make it a little faster.

I'll also probably start publishing it here, because why not? Here you go:

"Jerry, just remember: It's not a lie if you believe it."
-- George Costanza

Josh Shaw: This is the USC football fabulist (ne
team captain) who claimed to have injured his ankles jumping from an
upper-story balcony to save his drowning nephew -- to widespread,
fevered acclaim -- only to reveal it was a lie.

The piece of this that fascinates me is not that the story turned out
not to be true, but that given its uplifting, made-for-virality details,
we all have been conditioned to assume it was true.

Why? As Shaw realized he would have to make up a fiction for himself, as
he weighed the possibilities of believability, he decided on the most
Upworthy-ish story possible. The most social story possible.

Our attention is fleeting -- we read a headline (yes, sometimes a bait-y
one), we click a "like," we pass things along -- especially the
feel-good stuff. That's not some cranky critique; that's how people have
implicitly told us they want to consume.

This is the real "curiosity gap" -- in the moment, it didn't quite
matter that it wasn't real; your Facebook feed, your favorite
sports-news outlet, your in-person "did-you-hear" source made it real.

SeatGeek: The engine for finding tickets to sports and cultural events announced new $35 million funding,
led by Accel, the same VC firm that led a similarly sized round in Vox
Media a year ago. (I'm a fan of the product and the team, who organize
the excellent On Deck Conference, which I participated in last year.)

But much of the enthusiasm is reserved for who ELSE was in the round:
Peyton and Eli Manning. Nas. Carmelo Anthony (through his new VC fund).
An owner of the Boston Celtics. Shane Battier. And, curiously, Stanford
University Athletics. Athletes getting into early-stage investing is a
pretty well-known thing at this point. But that last one -- Stanford
Athletics -- feels like a harbinger, and other universities should be
paying close attention.

With a free-market implosion pending for big-time college athletics, I
could see more universities (who are almost all currently heavily
invested in various funds, VC and otherwise) and their high-net-worth
athletic departments leveraging their athletics cash flow and hedging
their increasingly uncertain market positions by creating funds to
invest in venture-backed early-stage companies that fit an athletic
department's thesis of the future.

And if an athletic department doesn't have a thesis of the future yet, that better move up on the to-do list.

Speaking of innovation in ticketing: Re/code's Peter Kafka reports on Aziz Ansari's interesting way of using Twitter and texting
to generate exclusive enthusiasm among his fans for upcoming shows.
(Also: Ansari's partner is David Cho, publisher of Grantland and former
GM of The Awl and all-around smart operator. I could see this working
for a much wider range of entertainers and athletes.)

Parenting: If you pay your kid to do chores, this from the NYT's indispensable Ron Lieber is worth a read.
(I adhere to Lieber's philosophy: We don't link kids' allowance to
chores; chores are part of their responsibility as part of the family.
The allowance is to help teach them financial literacy.)

Just in time for college football's kickoff tonight:
Every year, Spencer Hall writes an essay to kick off the new college
football season -- often only tangentially relating to college football.
I look forward to it every August, and it never disappoints. This year's edition is no exception. "Sense
has never made a dent in how people ****, drink, or watch football.
They are inelastic ghosts with tin ears and large, bellowing mouths."

Now, I just need to get Verizon FIOS to allow me to watch the SEC Network in the out-of-SEC market that I live in.

File away this quote: "If anything, we need to
make it clear that you can use Twitter without tweeting." -- Adam Bain,
Twitter president of global revenue and partnerships, on CNBC this morning (h/t @sdkstl)

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

*Finally broke the ice and published the first edition of my new email newsletter today. Sign up if you want it in your inbox. (I'm not quite sure why I wouldn't republish it here, too...)

*Mainly, I needed to just publish -- I was thinking WAY too much about it and WAY too concerned about it being profound or perfect (as if I have that capacity anyway).

*Anyway: What you'll find in today's email is a quick take on Twitch -- the money quote: "I'm not saying Twitch is the next ESPN; I'm saying Twitch looks a lot like the original ESPN."

*College football starts tonight, but things really feel like they get ramped up tomorrow night with A&M vs. South Carolina -- arguably the best game of the weekend. Get ready for the weekend via EDSBS.

Monday, August 25, 2014

*Really had every intention of starting the new email newsletter today, but I underestimated that the First Day of School (Gabe 3rd, Jonah K) would KO my morning writing time. Still time to sign up in time to be there for issue 1.1!

*I might have talked about the first day of school, which was as emotionally mixed as ever -- especially with Jonah making the leap to elementary school.

*If you're curious, in our night-before-school Talk, we emphasize two very basic things to them: (1) Being friendly to EVERYONE (especially showing compassion for the students who are different/new/etc.) and (2) being a meaningful contributor to the class by showing respect to the teacher/classmates and trying their best.

*And, yes, we bought each kid a special back-to-school gift -- colorful Nike Elite basketball socks, which have been and remain THE fashion accessory for elementary school boys.

*I might have talked about the Quartz redesign, which I love. Their new "home page" is very Quickish-ish, which is affirming -- if (very) delayed gratification.

*I might have talked about Chris Collinsworth getting into early-stage media company investing, buying a chunk of ProFootballFocus, which is less a site for fans than a data analyst for teams.

*DraftKings raised $41M (!) to continue to dominate daily fantasy gaming (along with FanDuel) and they bought StarStreet, whose founder I first met during Quickish's very early days. Congrats to him.

(Disclaimer: I was a Time-Warner employee at SI in 1998-99, working on the digital efforts - it shouldn't surprise you that Peter King was as forward-looking about it as anyone in the building, which is why he is publishing his own site right now and the rest of the place -- not SI, but Time Inc. -- is having trouble.)

*But, in thinking about it, I probably would have written about the timeless allure of the fantasy football draft (I have one tonight) and, maybe, how Gabe is ready to draft his own team.

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DanShanoff.com is a sports-blog spin-off of my long-time ESPN.com column, "The Daily Quickie." Anchored by an early-morning post of must-know topics, the blog is updated frequently throughout the day with new posts and user comments.